Elbows and Assumptions

People are stereotyped every day. To be more specific, people are stereotyped every day by me. I know I do it, and I admit it—but I always keep it to myself and remain as poised as I possibly can. And in all fairness, I’m stereotyped in return. I’m stereotyped for being a girl, for being blonde, for being from the south…the list is endless. However, I wasn’t aware that by being a blonde girl from the south, people could deduct that I don’t smoke pot. The means to this end has eluded me somehow. I don’t understand what one has to do with the other, and at the time that that assumption was made, I didn’t have enough courage to ask.

I was sitting in my fiction class, with a story that was so grammatically in-correct that the only two things I could deduct from it where the author’s name and the title of the piece. Everything else was a heap of run-on sentences and misspelled words. During our discussion of the piece, someone mentioned the bad grammar, and since I hadn’t been able to muddle through it for a real plot, I didn’t have much else to add to the conversation. But of course, I was called on for my opinion. So I glanced down at my notes and realized that I had unknowingly made a list of every word in the story that I thought was a name for marijuana. There were thirteen altogether, ranging from the ordinary “joint” to the more knowledgeable “swag” to the expert “elbow.” Looking back, I should have just agreed with the girl who’d mentioned the grammar mistakes. It probably would have saved me a little embarrassment, but hindsight is—well, you know.

The second I mentioned all the vocabulary used to identify marijuana, the entire class was staring at me. I could see it in their eyes. Did she really just say that out loud? I looked at the few people I actually talked to outside of class for some back-up, but they were busy tearing the corners off their papers and biting their thumb nails. I was on my own.

“Well,” a boy from across the table finally said, “If you could figure out that they were the same as marijuana, anyone could, right?”

It took a second for the insult behind that comment to hit me. How was I supposed to reply to that? Whether I had or hadn’t smoked pot was really none of their business. And why exactly, was it a bad thing if I hadn't smoked pot? For the sake of the story we were working on, I was merely suggesting that the author cut the “pot lingo”—as it was so lovingly referred to for the rest of the semester—down to a minimum, say three different terms. That way he didn’t isolate his audience too much.

With as much dignity as I could muster I replied, “Well, I’m just saying, even people that have smoked pot might not know what some of those words mean. Elbow for instance. Who thinks of pot when someone says elbow?”

When the only nod of understanding came from the teacher I gave up. Let him have the narrowest audience he can get, all because he can’t say pot instead of elbow. It’s going to take someone that’s been smoking a lot of elbow to get through that grammar anyway.

And as for them jumping to conclusions about my experience with it, let’s just say that what they don’t know, they don’t know. Stereotyping is never a good thing, but stereotyping people on things you can’t possibly know about them is even worse.